Maybe it's simply the case that _concealment is essential to identity_, that, notwithstanding the cultural trends towards reality-based programming, notwithstanding talk shows and talk radio and their confessional opportunities, we need a part of us that will never be known, so that the more we reveal, the more we are enveloped in veils, layers that refuse to be known, additional integuments of guilt and concealment, such that _any memoir is a fiction_, an arranged narrative, a _bildungsroman_, just as many fictions are veiled memoirs; the two identities, the two narrative strategies, concealing and revealing, depending on and excluding each other by turns.